Claws and Effect

by Amanda Arista

  “Are you ready to take on a woman with so much baggage?”

  “Might need a bigger trunk, but bring it.”

  I smiled and sat up. Chaz did too, which brought us nose to nose. “I love you, Violet Jordan.”

  “I love you, Charles Garrett.”

  He laughed. And then kissed me. A warm soft goldeny kiss from my fiancé.

  My eyes fluttered open as I pulled away.

  “Is there anything else that I need to know?” Chaz asked.

  I bit my lower lip as I thought. “I got fired from the movie for missing so many deadlines?”

  “That’s sucks. Anything else?” he rose and offered me a hand off the porch.

  I gestured to my torso. “This is me shields up.”

  Chaz’s eyebrows jumped. “I thought you were just going casual since we were around shifters.”

  “Nope. Iris said that being a Prima I couldn’t hide anymore, and well, I can’t hide anymore. It’s going to make going back to Dallas very interesting.”

  Chaz kept my hand in his. “So I’m going to marry a radioactive, unemployed, trouble magnet with a lot of baggage.”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “Awesome.”

  I punched him playfully and moved toward the door to say our good byes.

  “TIME FOR YOU two to go?” Piper asked as she looked up from the kitchen table. She and Merci were making a shopping list. How wonderfully mundane.

  “Need to head back to the troops. Do you have a mirror?”

  All three of them looked at me like I was insane.

  “Best friend. Fairy. Can mirror magic me back home in three seconds.”

  “I’m not leaving my car here,” Chaz said.

  I turned around to face him. “We don’t have time to drive back. I’ve already been gone too long.”

  “I’ve got all my gear in the car, I can’t unpack all that.”

  I huffed.

  Piper laughed. “Their first fight as an engaged couple.”

  “Awww,” Merci cooed. “Looks good on you, Garrett.”

  He glared at the woman over my shoulder. He licked his lips. “I can get us home in . . .” he looked up at the ceiling as he calculated. “Five hours?”

  “How?”

  He winked. “You’re not the only one with best friends in high places.”

  I smirked at him and then turned back to Piper. “Guess I won’t need that mirror.”

  Chaz excused himself to freshen up before the trip home. I was waiting for another moment to be alone with Piper.

  “So you haven’t given me the key to, you know, making it work,” I asked as we dallied on the porch.

  “Here’s the secret.” Piper leaned in. “Love him.”

  Huh must have magically appeared across my forehead and the woman laughed. And laughed. And laughed. She had to brace herself against the porch railing and hold her chest until she caught her breath.

  “You are a funny one, Violet Jordan.”

  “Heard that before. But what’s so funny?”

  Piper laid her hand on my arm and shared a little of her joy with me. “What I meant was when you are with him and truly love him that is magic in itself. When you love him and you’re with him, there is strength in that that the panther, the power can not interfere with.”

  I looked out at the forest that surrounded the house. “That’s too simple.”

  “Love is never simple, sacred curse or no. But if you love someone, you’ll find that you have oodles of magic at your fingers tips and can survive everything.”

  “Oodles? Really?” I raised an eyebrow.

  Piper laughed again and her energy raced around me, tickling me playfully. “Go home, Violet Jordan.”

  Chaz came out of the house and put his hand on my back. “Ready?”

  I nodded and looked over at Piper. “Can I come back some day, when I’m not a complete wreck?”

  “Of course. But call first.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THREE HOURS AND fifty-five minutes later we were just about to cross the Texas-Arkansas border and needed gas. I desperately needed coffee and a potty break.

  When I came back to the car with an armful of sustenance, Chaz was still pumping gas.

  “So let’s run through what we are up against?” he said.

  I tossed the goodies in the passenger seat and walked around to lean against the trunk. “Wind elemental with a big chip on his shoulder. Took Cristina about three days ago. Came complete with bloody visions that said don’t follow her. Tucker and Tyler were released on bail four hours ago. Jessa went to collect them, and they should all be holed up in my house.”

  “How long have you been gone?”

  “Two days.”

  “And I’ve been gone for four weeks.”

  I nodded as I sipped the truck stop coffee. It wasn’t too bad.

  “So this might be the last quiet moment that we have, forever.”

  “I wouldn’t say forever, but . . .”

  He grabbed my waist and lifted me up to settle on the trunk of the car. I giggled, minding the coffee in my hand. “What are you doing?”

  “Grabbing my Violet time when I can.”

  “It’s not going to be like that.”

  “Now’s not the time for stories.”

  I sighed and looked down at him. I don’t know if the sadness in his look was from the moment or from the station lights. I reached up and held his face. He closed his eyes and kissed the inside of my palm.

  “If we had three more days. The world’s not ending. The bills don’t need to be paid. What would you want to do?”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “Bed-and-breakfast.”

  “What?”

  “Three days, on a lake somewhere. No one but you, me, and the fishes.”

  “That sounds heavenly.”

  “And with the speedometer, we could do it on the beach.”

  I leaned forward and kissed him. It was supposed to be a sweet and innocent kiss, but when was the last time one of my plans actually worked out.

  We stopped then the attendant pounded on the window.

  Giggling, I took his chin. “What if I told you that we could actually do it on the beach?”

  Chaz tawny eyebrow arched high above his golden brown eyes.

  I smiled down at him, and I felt like I was glowing. There was nothing between us anymore and it felt like the entire world was at our feet.

  The perfect time to go home and kick some ass.

  FOUR HOURS AND thirty-five minutes on the road and we were just about to pass the Metroplex city limits and it felt like a linebacker slammed me back into the passenger seat.

  “Violet?”

  It felt like an anvil landed on my chest, and I pressed my hand against my breast bone, trying to suck in the breath that had been knocked out of me.

  “Periphery spell?” he asked.

  “No.” I closed my eyes and the answer echoed back to me. “The boys are in trouble.”

  “I thought they were at your place.”

  “Guess not.”

  I quickly strummed Tucker’s. I would be there soon.

  As Chaz pulled up to the street outside my town house, I saw the terra cotta pot, which had previously held a lavender plant for protection, tipped over and broken.

  I leaped out of the car but froze before Chaz had to say anything about rushing into a situation half-cocked.

  I heard the distinct click of his gun as he loaded a round in the chamber. Slowly, I reached out for the handle and twisted it. Unlocked.

  I pushed open the door and waited for something to happen.

  “Do you sense anything?”

  Closing my eyes, I sent the power forward through the house. It was all so much easier now. The power, the control. With me not fighting against it, it didn’t fight me back.

  Nash and Jessa’s scents still lingered there but it was no longer warm. “No one’s home. And they ha
ven’t been here in a while.”

  I walked through the front door and nearly tripped over Nash’s shoes. I stared down at them.

  “What?” Chaz asked as he looked around.

  As my brain wrote a bad scenario after an even worse scenario, my mouth seemed to find words to fill the silence of the house. “We both take our shoes off when we shift. We talked about it once.”

  Carefully, I walked through the house. Nothing was out of place. There were books strewn across the dining room table and a cold cup of tea on the coffee table, like there usually was after one of my own research sessions.

  Chaz circled the first floor and met me in the middle of the living room where I was frantically calling all of them on my cell. I was hoping for a family outing an Eatzi’s for dinner, but I knew I was wrong.

  All the calls rang to voicemail, except for Tuckers.

  The line picked up.

  “Come and get them.”

  The line disconnected.

  My brain latched onto that voice and immediately Carlisle’s face appeared in my vision, his lightening blue eyes and his black stringy hair. He had my boys and my best friend.

  I didn’t mean to crush the cell phone but it couldn’t withstand the anger that poured around me, hot as lava.

  Chaz took a step back. “Violet?”

  I held up a finger. “Just let me be angry. I just need a moment.”

  And I was, I felt that brilliant heat against my skin, and I imagined a million ways for Carlisle to die. Most of them had him impaled on something. There’s little Violet Jordan’s dark side in case you missed it.

  Chaz slipped his hand into my left. He squeezed it tightly, and I felt the pressure of the engagement ring around my finger. “I can find them, Violet. With you as the anchor. But we are not rushing in there half-cocked.”

  That’s what I needed. A joke and the reassurance that he was the one. I laughed and the anger seeped away. My head cleared. And I looked up at him. “We need a plan.”

  I FELT THEM ALL through the five-minute shower. Chaz pointed out that I hadn’t showered in three days. I reminded him that technically, he hadn’t showered in three weeks.

  He acquiesced and went first.

  I dressed, pulled my shoes back on, all the while paying attention to the five strings, which means that even Shadow hadn’t escaped but meant that all of them were alive.

  I found Chaz, freshly showered as well. Hadn’t shaved though. I’d hidden the razor. What can I say? I missed the stubble.

  He handed me a sandwich.

  “What’s this?” I asked as I looked between the bread.

  “Sustenance. You haven’t had anything since Maine. And no, beef jerky doesn’t count as a meal.”

  I tore into the sandwich. “My little domestic god,” I said around a mouthful.

  Chaz winked at me. “There needs to be at least one person who cooks in this marriage.

  “Do you really think this is the time to start criticizing my skills in the kitchen?”

  “What skills? Coffee is the only thing that you make well.”

  “Good idea. I’m going to need caffeine.”

  I went into the kitchen. “What’s the plan?”

  “We load up.” I heard him in the living room, throwing things into that trusty olive drab duffle. “And then we find them.”

  I prepped two to-go mugs of cinnamon latté and joined him in the living room.

  As I walked toward him, I handed him the coffee.

  He took a sip. “Cinnamon?”

  “Yeap.”

  “You’re an angel.”

  I smiled as I sipped the perfect drink. Maybe I was good at something else besides writing. “So how do we do this?”

  When I looked back up at him, his eyes were golden. Not the hazel that they usually were, but glowing gold. He looked different too, stronger all of a sudden, a powerful squareness to his frame, and I realized that this was his game face. This was him charged and ready to work.

  His warm energy swirled around him as he reached out to touch my chest. It wasn’t a lusty kind of touch, unfortunately, but him reaching out to find the anchor.

  I relaxed and trusted him, let him work his mojo. I closed my eyes, if nothing else to keep from taking this someplace a little dirty, like slipping his hand over four inches.

  I knew when he’d found the anchor. There was a surge around my skin as if he was locking onto me. He pulled his hand away.

  When I opened up my eyes, his eyes were golden. Pure golden. My Hero.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  IN THE FROST Farms community, the house we were lurking outside of was the smallest in the neighborhood at around seven thousand square feet. There were twenty or so cars lined up along the acre-long drive to the front door.

  Chaz and I were carefully walking the tree line parallel to the drive way. “This is one of Haverty’s houses.”

  “One of?” I asked.

  “Guy had a dozen or so around the city to duck into if anything happened.”

  “Smart move.”

  “And if I know my pack law, it all belongs to the pack leader.”

  “What?”

  Chaz stopped and turned toward me. “Means that all those safe houses could be yours.”

  I shook my head. I’d known it from the first moment we set foot on the property that this place was evil. It was the kind of feeling that people report when they walk into a haunted house. Metaphysical slime ran down my back and I was just on the back yard.

  “Since when were you on the Violet gets a pack bandwagon?”

  “Since it looks good on you, Violet.”

  I glared at him. I didn’t have time for this right now. I needed to go in there, wipe the floor with Carlisle and then kiss on my fiancé for three days. “Can we try to survive all this first before we start talking real estate?”

  Chaz shrugged.

  We slunk around the back and found an open door to the kitchen. Just standing wide open. This was too easy. Of course, Carlisle was expecting me to do something stupid.

  “What do you think?” Chaz asked as he began to take every weapon out of the bag and put it somewhere on his person.

  “Same plan as before. I walk in there, you try to sneak around? It worked so well the first time.”

  “I don’t know, Vi. There’s a lot more this time.”

  “Got anything better?”

  He looked around. His eyes gazed the windows, the doors, the shrubs lining the periphery. “We could go in together. It’s not like I’m going to slip in the back with forty people here.”

  “Do you really think there are forty people in there?”

  “By the cars outside, it’s a pack meeting. Which puts the last known total at forty-seven.”

  “That was suspiciously specific. I think I’m going to need a crash course in everything you know about the pack.”

  “Tucker didn’t fill you in?”

  “Mostly, we talked about how Haverty kept them in check.”

  Chaz licked his lips as he looked at the open door. “Most of them are everyday people. Just happen to have a legacy. I would only say that fifteen or so were really evil.”

  “So really, we are just looking at fifteen baddies to take down.”

  “I love how you always see the not-so-apocalyptic side to things.”

  I winked at him and headed for the open door.

  THE GROUP WAS in a two-story ballroom. I could feel their energies running around, none of them strong enough to really need a shield around them. Except for maybe Jessa and Carlisle and neither of them could be bothered.

  Five of those brick walls that just happened to be flesh covered had cement grips on all of my boys. I recognized them from the zoo. One of them even had a choke collar on Shadow. Who does that?

  Chaz walked the other direction. Guess we were trying it the old fashion way.

  So I did what I did best: I made an entrance. I kicked the doors open; I�
�d always wanted to do that. My Chuck hit the part of the door just above the handle and the lock shattered and it swung out beautifully.

  “I have to say,” I said in the loudest voice I could muster. I wanted it to bounce off the high walls and drill into Carlisle’s brain. “These are some nice digs here.”

  “Get her!” Carlisle yelled, his small finger pointing at me.

  I glared at the two men who followed his order and noted out of my periphery that ninety percent of them didn’t move.

  Flexing my power, I leaped at them. Using one of their faces as a spring board, I cracked the other in the jaw with my heel and landed on my feet as they landed on the floor.

  Make that thirteen bad guys. Though I knew that I was pretty lucky with those two. I adjusted my jacket and flipped my hair over my shoulders. “You were saying something?”

  I began to walk around the room. Using the others as cover, I slipped in and out of their energies, letting the radioactivity dance around them. And they didn’t seem to mind. For being part of an evil pack, the others, men, woman, young, old, didn’t seem to mind as I wandered through them.

  “I am unifying the pack,” Carlisle watched as I wove around the edge of the room. “Dallas needs a unified pack.”

  I stopped just at the line where my boys were being held to the ground. “That might be the first thing that you and I agree on, Blew. Dallas does need a unified pack. But does it have to be under you?”

  There was a general ruffle in the air, as if others might actually agree with me. Go Team Violet.

  I went on. “At what point in this little conversation are you going to mention that they have a choice? There is the pack formerly known as Haverty’s complete with that creepy devil mark and then there is me.”

  Saying it out loud made my skin prickle as I felt what could only be pride stemming from the boys. Despite their current situation, they still had faith in me. It made me bolder.

  “I was one of Haverty’s barons,” Carlisle said. He was managing to bounce his voice off the walls as well, to make him more fearful than his little frame warranted. “The only one left.”

  I gulped. The only one left. Could that have been all the occurrences around town? The flying cars and magical explosion—just Carlisle taking out the competition?

  He saw me and a smile crept across his thin lips. “I am the strongest. I will keep us strong.”